Nicasio to the Rangers and Andrew Romine to the White Sox ... both minor league deals

for me, the phillies strategy for making the playoff in 2020 comes down to `just' 3 things: coaching, health, and rookies, with the first ranking way ahead of the other two in potential positive impact.

(1) coaching. management has a surprisingly plausible case for hoping that changing manager and the top two coaches will produce a signficant improvement. by my reckoning, only kingery exceeded expectations in 2019, while the list of those failing to meet expectations includes harper (ymmv), hoskins, segura, nola, eflin, pivetta, and velasquez. the nola and hoskins regressions were fairly devastating. reversing just those and keeping the rest the same would be worth four wins. if coaching really was the problem, the phils could take a huge (4 to 8 win) leap forward (on top of the wins adding wheeler and deleting franco) and the brain trust is going to deserve kudos for correcting their biggest mistake of 2018-19. if overestimating and overpaying talent is the problem, there isn't much hope for their near future.

(2) health. every team has injury issues, and our own always seem worse relative to the league than they really are, but losing and entire bullpen in addition to cutch and jake is clearly worse than average. just regressing to normal injury luck should be worth at least one win. i am a bit concerned that management may expect better health to add 2 or three wins. with better than average luck, that's possible, but it isn't likely. bullpenners and aging pitchers (arrieta) and outfielders (cutch) get hurt. that's normal. and good luck on those fronts can be wiped out to a single injury to a supposedly healthy young star in his prime (any one of nola, wheeler, harper, or realmuto).

(3) rookies. as usual, i'm reading every offseason prospect list i can find while compiling my spreadsheet to calculate the phillies consensus rankings. the system behind bohm and howard remains worryingly weak, but that top two is the best combo of nearly-ready prospects we've had since the building of the 2008 champs was nearing completion. don't be fooled by howard's mid-range top-100 rank. it is just the spring 2020 injury holding him out of top 20 or top 10. the scouts are drooling. stuff-wise, they seem to like him as much as sixto, and some have him above sixto even accounting for age. everyone seems to expect him to make it to the show by midseason. as for bohm... this is where i fear the phillies planning and reality may differ, if they are counting on a mlb contribution from him in 2020. i just read yet another scathing assessment of his defense. the only hopes for him succeeding in the nl in the near term seem based on assuming that he will improve quickly at 3b if they stop trying to get him to learn 1b as well. i have to admit that this isn't completely unfounded, since the worst of the reviews all are associated with when he was bouncing between 3b and 1b in the 2019 afl, and he cut down the error rate considerably when playing only (mostly?) as a 3b for the national team later in the offseason. tea-leaf reading suggests that the phils may be counting on 2 wins from adding howard and bohm in 2020. i think getting just one extra win from the combo of these and other rookies is more likely.

wrt injuries, was it really that bad in terms of how much it affected our wins and losses? First of all, losing one starter and one position player doesn't seem that bad, especially when the starter still pitched most of the year. It doesn't seem that unusual for a team to lose one starter for part of the year.

Losing Cutch definitely hurt, but again, we only lost one guy. The yankees lost several position players for the whole year and another for much of the year. I don't think it's very usual to lose one position player for 2/3 of a season.

We definitely did get hit hard in the BP, but we still ended up right in the middle of the pack in BP ERA. The other teams in our division almost all had worse BPs, some by a lot, and they still finished ahead of us.There's so much variation in BP performance that I don't think you can say we should have had one of the top 5 BPs, though it looked good before the season, and so I doubt the injuries to the BP really cost us many games because we had some guys come and fill in reasonably well.

Taken together, I think I'll feel fortunate if we only have one major injury this year in the starting 8 and one minor one to the starters.And if the BP is in the middle of the pack or a little better, I'll also be pretty happy.IOW, I just don't think injuries hurt us that much last year, even though it did cause some chaos and gnashing of teeth.Other than the number of guys we lost in the BP, which didn't seem to kill us, it seems like we had a fairly normal year with injuires.

Monkeyboy wrote:wrt injuries, was it really that bad in terms of how much it affected our wins and losses?

i thought i addressed this by saying that i think they were only about one win worse than average on the injury front in 2019, and by pointing out that jake, cutch, and relievers are exactly the types of players one should expect to get hurt.
don't forget, though, that just about everyone they brought in to plug lineup and bench holes also ended up on the injured list: bruce, miller, haseley, lomo, dickerson, nick williams, quinn (of course), and even sean rodriguez. maybe there was black mold under the benches where phils bullpenners and lineup reserves sat during 2019?

spotrac has a great tool for checking injured list stats:
https://www.spotrac.com/mlb/disabled-li ... tive-team/
the yanks were easily the most snake-bit team in 2020, but the phils were 4th worst (third in the nl behind the pads and p-rats) in total injured list days in 2019. they were tied (with mets, nats, and rockies) for 6th in mlb and 4th in the nl in most different injured players.
phils, nats and mets all had 22 il players, but the phils had 1727 il days, against 1437 for the mets and 1110 for the nats. the braves were at 21 and 1094.

their chart showed me that i overlooked the injuries to eflin and vv and odubel and segura when writing my previous emails. that's another month each of opening day rotation and lineup players. also forget to point out that everyone knows arrieta was pitching with pain for at least a month before he went on the il.

Good stuff for discussion phorever. Curious if you, or anyone else, think they Phillies actually view moves in terms of wins added. Can't remember anything that gave me that impression.

Uncle Milty wrote:Good stuff for discussion phorever. Curious if you, or anyone else, think they Phillies actually view moves in terms of wins added. Can't remember anything that gave me that impression.

they probably don't do win-calculus. thats more of a phorever-thing. .

Phillies sign RHP Drew Storen to a minor league deal and a camp invite. Gets 750K if he makes the major league roster

didn't think he was still pitching.

had an 8 era and a 2 whip for AA Royals last year.

Klentak really earning his keep........

Inquirer story on Girardi and Phillies' upcoming season.

Breaking News: Marcus Hayes is an asshat:

None of these things matters too much, however, since regardless of its composition, execution, and health, there’s no way the Phillies will play October baseball. Another playoff-free season should take care of general manager Matt Klentak’s tenure, which will clear the path for Girardi to pick Klentak’s successor, which will enable Girardi to mold the club in his own image.

Sounds mostly right outside of saying there’s no chance they make the playoffs.

Why is it a good thing for Joe Girardi to mold the club in his own image again? Is there a single good team in the league who’s composition is driven by the manager?

I realize I’m arguing with a Marcus Hayes point, but for fucks sake.

MoBettle wrote:Sounds mostly right outside of saying there’s no chance they make the playoffs.

Agreed, Not sure why he felt it necessary to throw it the gratuitous and wrong comment, but there you go.

Squire wrote:Phillies sign RHP Drew Storen to a minor league deal and a camp invite. Gets 750K if he makes the major league roster

Can't hurt. Now, 10 more of these.

PSUPhilliesPhan wrote:

Squire wrote:Phillies sign RHP Drew Storen to a minor league deal and a camp invite. Gets 750K if he makes the major league roster

Can't hurt. Now, 10 more of these.

unless he ends up pitching for the phillies and he sucks and they keep running him out there

Good thing he’ll have his own uniform number or we’d confuse him with every other reliever we throw out there.

signed Bud Norris to a minor league deal

BigEd76 wrote:signed Bud Norris to a minor league deal

Now we’re talking


What’s Jeff Suppan up to?